DISCUSSION
GROUP
Students enrolling in those schools (both of which have some 30,000 students total) this September will find themselves in the overwhelming company of their urban peers. The most recent statistics published by China’s state-owned media showed that of China’s top two schools, Peking University had a rural population of 16.3 percent in 1999 (down from 50 percent to 60 percent in the 1950s), while Tsinghua University had a rural population of 17.6 percent in 2000. Both figures are from the most recent years in which any sort of dependable data have been published; experts and students alike agree that the numbers have shrunk even further since then. Pan Wei, a professor at the school of international studies at PKU, told the blog The China Beat that the number might be as low as 1 percent—a shocking statistic considering that more than half of China’s population is rural. “We can hardly find anyone here with a rural household registration,” Pan told NEWSWEEK. Media-relations officers at both schools did not answer calls for comment.
China’s Ivy League Is No Place For Peasants.
As China tries to graduate from the world’s factory to a nation with a strong middle class, its peasants still aren’t ready to make the leap.
A student studies at a Tsinghua University library in Beijing,
where poor and rural students are being excluded.
As China tries to graduate from the world’s factory to a nation with a strong middle class, its peasants still aren’t ready to make the leap. According to official statistics, China’s urban-rural income gap reached 3.33:1 in 2009, the widest since 1978, if not before. And as the gap increases, poor peasants are becoming marginalized in higher education, closing off one of their best opportunities for advancement. The trend is particularly alarming in Tsinghua and Peking universities, known as China’s MIT and Harvard respectively for their places atop China’s academic totem pole.
Across China, peasants make up 56 percent of the college-age population but only 50 percent of university students, mostly concentrated in China’s vocational schools or less prestigious universities. Yet the very top schools are the most skewed toward city residents. Why can’t peasants make it into elite universities? “Every rural area in China, including the outskirts of Beijing, lacks the educational resources of urban areas,” says Liu Hong, executive director of Peer China, a nonprofit organization that focuses on bringing educational equality to Chinese secondary schools.
Traditionally, entrance to a university depended solely on an applicant’s score on a standardized test, called the Gaokao. But over the last five years or so, “China went into a different system that relied less on the Gaokao and started to allow for more monkeying with the system,” says James Z. Lee, dean of humanities and social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “If you’re fluent in French, you have a better chance of getting into a good university in China; that used to not be the case.” In other words, Chinese schools are copying Western ones that consider applicants in a more holistic way as they try to nurture well-rounded individuals instead of ace test takers. Yet, Liu says, “focusing on individuals widens the gap between urban and rural, because teachers in rural areas” can’t offer their students nearly as well-rounded an education as their urban counterparts can.
The problems with peasant education are manifest. Farming villages aren’t great places to live, so they have a tough time attracting good teachers. In the experience of one educational NGO worker who works in rural China and asked to remain anonymous because of a company policy not to criticize China to the media, “Many teachers in rural areas who have college degrees actually only have them from continuing-education programs, which don’t really provide an education.” The aid worker described visiting rural schools and asking principals how many of their teachers have been to university: “The principals will say 100 percent, but if you dig a little deeper you’ll find out that something like 20 percent have gone to university and the remaining 80 percent have degrees from these short-term programs.” Unsurprisingly, English-language teaching is especially bad. Although it’s required, Liu points out, “the middle-school English education is next to nothing; even the best students will have to have thorough remedial work in catch-up English.”
What’s more, as wages continue to rise, the opportunity cost for peasants to leave high school and enter the work force skyrockets. Good high schools can cost $3,000 for three years, and a high-school-age laborer can earn $150 a month; that’s a cost differential of about $8,400—a fortune for poor peasant families.
Public health is another part of the problem that affects the poorer half of peasants, who make up about 28 percent of China’s college-eligible population. Scott Rozelle, codirector of the Rural Education Action Project at Stanford University, points to health problems, such as 40 percent anemia rates among poor and rural Chinese children—and the failure of the Ministry of Education to provide nutritious lunch programs. A spokesman for the ministry, asked about nutritious lunches, told NEWSWEEK to “get in touch directly with various schools in China, since China has so many schools and the conditions are different.”
A bureaucratic gap between the responsibilities of the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education exacerbates the health problems of poor students. “There is not one school in a poor area that has a nurse, and there’s no budget for health exams,” says Rozelle. “We asked a thousand principals in poor schools the rate of anemia among their students, and 82 percent said, ‘What’s anemia?’ ” Anemia significantly drags down test results not only of students with the disease but also of their peers, because students with anemia tend to disrupt classroom learning.
An urbanite from Hebei province, Shi Shuo graduated from Tsinghua University in 2008 with a major in art design. “I think the number of peasant students definitely dropped in the four years I was there,” he says. “As resources become more and more concentrated into the hands of people with power and money, it’s more and more difficult for regular families to get into elite universities.” In the topsy-turvy Mao era, students carried their peasant background with pride, and elite universities were full of peasants. In a speech last year, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao mused about how when he attended university “almost 80 percent, or even higher, of my classmates were from peasant villages.” Yet as China’s economy started growing in the late 1970s, and wealth became more and more concentrated in urban areas, poverty and agriculture became symbols of an impoverished, out-of-touch China that many of its urbanites are happy to have moved beyond. “I live in a dorm, and all of my roommates are from urban backgrounds,” says Li Xiao, a rising junior at PKU. Li says that of all the kids she knows at school, just three or five admitted to having rural backgrounds; maybe more came from the country “but they’re ashamed to speak about it.”
China’s education system, where peasants can get a rudimentary education before populating thousands of factories along its eastern coast, suited it when the country sought to be the world’s sweatshop. “At the same level of development in their history, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. had practically full enrollments in high school,” says Rozelle. By contrast, only 60 percent to 70 percent of China’s current high-school-age students are in high school. Yet factory jobs will continue to migrate to places like India. Wages in China will continue to rise. And as long as China finds no better way to educate its rural poor, it’s staring down a future with a 100 million-strong underclass.
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”
This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”
Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.
The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.
And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.
Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.
But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.
Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.
So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.
Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.
Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”
There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.
“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.
Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.
There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.
________________________________
A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.
Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.
Zhou Family Ties
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
Write a comment
Martha (Sunday, 22 August 2010 21:04)
WOW! These are big ideas. I think it is useful to look at what has happened in the U.S. when thinking about any country which is in a developmental stage regarding the modernization of an entire society.
In the U.S., we moved, in a relatively short time, likely to make us look like snails compared to the currently developing countries, from an agriculturally based economy and from a population of uneducated people to a system which purports to serve all, but which, in my opinion serves no one very well, and which serves the country badly.
In the U.S., we suppose that we educate everyone, and that there is equal opportunity for each child to have one or more advanced degrees from university. However, that is not true.
I think that a look at MIT or Harvard or any of the other 50 or 100 top schools in the country would show that the students came from urban or suburban schools, that they come from families with higher than average incomes, and that most of them are essentially in job training.
Do I have a problem with that? Yes.
Let me say first, that I have a problem with the idea that every kid has to go to college, ideally to end up with an advanced degree. How silly. What would we do with millions of doctors, lawyers, biologists, chemists, nuclear scientists etc., etc., etc. Or even that they all would be teachers, or nurses or bookkeepers etc.
Who runs the corner store? or the repair services for all of our gadgets? or clerks in the market, or the clothing store, or anywhere else? Who produces the food, distributes it, makes things in factories? And, on and on and on. WE CAN'T ALL GO TO COLLEGE AND WE SHOULDN'T.
We need to find another way to value people and their services. Else, how will we value thinkers, writers, creative people? How will we communicate to kids that the world doesn't just depend on the person who makes the most moeny or has the most power? Why can't we value each for their part of the whole?
I have not seen a public school curriculum - or any other -that included reading substantial amounts of work by Ghandi or anyone else who had thought about how to not tolerate oppression without oppressing someone else.
It is important to feed everyone, keep everyone warm or cool, make everyone safe, provide health care for everyone, keep the environment from deteriorating further. It is imortant to value abstract thinking and critical thinking.
Nowhere in the world is this public policy.
Why not?
Tomaas (Monday, 16 July 2012 22:17)
will be restored quickly
szczegóły (Wednesday, 18 January 2017)
diplodok
wróżba (Saturday, 21 January 2017 15:42)
zemrzyjmy